Natural Phenomena
(Fenómenos naturales)
Marcos Díaz Sosa / Cuba / 2024 / 80 min
Guadalajara Int'l Film Festival
Best First FeatureHabana Int'l Film Festival
Best First FeatureAFI Latin American Film Festival
São Paulo Int'l Film Festival
Filmar En América Latina Genève
Best First FeatureBalneário Camboriú Film Festival
Nocturna Award
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Spanish with English subtitles
With Andrea Doimeadios, Reinier Díaz, Armando Miguel Gómez
Why will your students love Natural Phenomena? This wildly original tropical Cuban reinterpretation of Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz is nothing short of mind-blowing. While the iconic red shoes make an appearance, everything else is reimagined in unexpected and delightful ways.
In late-1980s Cuba, local nurse Vilma is a crack shot eager to enter the national skeet shooting competition. The prize money would help her fulfill her dream of a bigger, more comfortable home where she could care for her injured husband and raise their soon-to-arrive child. Unfortunately for her, pregnant women are barred from competing, dashing her hopes — until a freak tornado whisks her over the rainbow to Niña Bonita, the isle hosting the tournament. Donning a blue dress and red slippers, Vilma sets out to prove her mettle in a strange land.
Natural Phenomenon captivates with its depiction of a strong, determined woman facing personal and social challenges as she seeks emancipation in a limiting context. A darkly comedic portrait of Cuban society, the film is a flourishing take on social cinema, a striking and moving narrative that addresses themes of freedom.
Exploring the rarely discussed topic of the exile of entire populations due to land exploitation, the film intertwines the protagonist’s struggle with broader social transformations in Cuba.
Press
“Through Vilma's perspective, the filmmaker dismantles the triumphalism of the Cuban revolutionary discourse, detached from the suffocating reality of its people. An entire era is mapped through motifs like sports and television. The film's most ambitious aspect is its expressive power. In a parodic tone, Marcos Díaz Sosa manipulates staging, character design, and cinematography to reinterpret the aesthetic codes and ideological principles that fueled socialist realism as a producer of collective imagery.” – ÁNGEL PÉREZ, Rialta
“With this loose adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, Díaz Sosa engages in a dialogue with much of the institutional Cuban cinema of the 1980s. This filmography, often seen as "cinema of error correction," carried a strong focus on proletarian values and customs, while offering “constructive” criticism of the “distortions” hindering the full realization of the promised socialist dream.” – Antonio Enrique González Rojas, Hyper Media
About the Director
As a playwright and theater director, he collaborated with the State Theater of Jena, Germany, from 2013 to 2018, where his plays El mal gusto (2013), Los sementales (2015), and Titanic (2018) premiered.
As a filmmaker, he has written and directed several short films, including his short Fenómenos naturales, which premiered at the 2016 Guadalajara Film Festival and won Best Short Film at the 2018 Festival Cine Latinoamericano de La Plata; Rocaman (2017); and El niño de goma (2021), which premiered at Bogoshorts.
Natural Phenomena, adapted from his short film, is his first narrative feature film.
Notes on Film
“Natural Phenomena parodies the kitsch of tropical socialism with an epic tone of socialist realism that cannot fully abandon its Caribbean melodrama. The story takes place during the period when our parents decided to have children here, at a time when the socialist bloc was collapsing and Cuba was heading toward an ever-deepening crisis.
The moment I am living today feels eerily similar. No one wants to continue life within Cuba, and birth rates are plummeting. The government clings to nationalistic rhetoric to justify its arbitrary decrees, including questionable relations with Russia. I became curious about how my parents mustered the bravery to have a child here, almost as an act of resistance.
I wanted to explore how the official narrative has seeped into the Cuban imagination, shaping and confusing our desires and goals. While the system promotes the dream of a communist utopia, we secretly yearn for the American dream. This irony led me to merge the epic tone of Cuban nationalism with the American patriotic myth of The Wizard of Oz. The famous line “There’s no place like home” is reimagined as communist and militarized slogans.
Although this story originates from real research, the film is not about the factual accuracy of the historical record. The events are deliberately distorted to create a bitter and surreal fairy tale. The characters and the audience are drawn into the kitsch fantasy of the communist utopia until they uncover the illusion behind the magic that has deceived them.
When the protagonist ultimately decides to return to her dull farm in the middle of nowhere, rejecting the chance to chase her dreams “beyond the rainbow,” she defends the need to confront our struggles from the place where we truly belong—even if happiness seems impossible there. A home is not defined by luxury and comfort but by the freedom to live according to the principles we choose.”
– Marcos Díaz Sosa, Director